Yu Suzuki is making it. In collaboration with Sega and Sony, however to prove the project has a fanbase he's set up a Kickstarter.
Shenmue 3 needs $2million but is already nearing $3.1million. The game is already guaranteed to come out with Japanese, English, German, French, Spanish and Italian subtitles - practically everyone is covered language-wise.

There are now stretch goals up to $5million and apparently more where they'be come from. The Kickstarter has been up for 2 days, and has 29 left to go (it was fully funded in 12 hours).
Chip in for great rewards and to help make Shenmue 3 the classic it deserves to be.

Campaign is at 3.47 million with 25 days left.
It's currently proceeding very slowly, like if the handbrake was pulled at day 3 or 4.
Reasons are probably:
1) mass-backing at the beginning
2) massive haters and media campaign about Sony's involvement in the project.
3) being the first goal reached and the external funds not clear in amounts and sources, potential backers are not incouraged to pledge. They might think that the game is going to be made anyway, and that the real budget requires so massive investments outside kickstarter that pledging on the KS won't make a difference.

(22-06-2015, 09:20 PM)Antares88 Wrote: It's currently proceeding very slowly, like if the handbrake was pulled at day 3 or 4.

This is pretty much how all game kickstarters been. Lots of backing at the beginning and at the end, but in the middle it's dead.
Anyway, it's really awesome a Shenmue 3 is happening and I really hope SEGA will make a Shenmue 1&2 HD too!

Another reason the kickstarter slowed was due to the press exposing that Sony was behind the making of Shenmue 3 and people got crazy like "why the hell then are we even putting money in it if Sony is already financing them?"

(02-07-2015, 12:11 AM)donluca Wrote: Another reason the kickstarter slowed was due to the press exposing that Sony was behind the making of Shenmue 3 and people got crazy like "why the hell then are we even putting money in it if Sony is already financing them?"

Most of the fans out there already dumped their money into the project, I'm not sure how high they could go but while the hate campaign surely hurted them, I wouldn't say it really "killed" the kickstarter.

In both you see a similar pattern at the beginning, with massive backing on day 1/2 quickly dropping immediately after. As you say, all the hardcore fans back at the beginning.
But what happened next? While Bloodstained graph keeps on stable weekly levels, Shenmue's dropped dead. The only possible reason of this drop is the hate campaign that sparkled on social networks, forums and big websites, convincing new users not to jump onboard.

Look also to the comments graphs, there's an insane debate around Shen Mue.

I think that the only things that can save this campaign are:
- a positive media campaign (hopefully beginning from tomorrow's tweet marathon) to clear the lies that were spread and give confidence to possible backers.
- the announcement of HD versions of ShenMue 1/2

Otherwise this kickstarter will never go over USD 5mln and the game won't have the open world features that we dream of.